UPDATE: You can learn more about our work w/Intel in a blog post from Billy Cox.

Opscode is pleased to announce the launch of our Chef for OpenStack project, a reference deployment for building and managing OpenStack clouds. There are already quite a few folks deploying OpenStack with Chef and we want to help make it more accessible to a larger ecosystem of users through a set of cookbooks and documentation. Even more importantly, we’re focusing on building the community around the use of Chef with OpenStack. Initial releases of cookbooks will be published to the Chef Community site and to GitHub under Opscode’s account. We’ll be driving them with a Chef repository with documentation detailing the purpose of each role, cookbook and recipe and how they can be used for various deployment styles. We’re also fostering collaboration with a new “Chef for OpenStack” mailing list and there is a dedicated IRC channel (#openstack-chef on irc.freenode.net) for discussions.

Opscode is not planning on doing this by ourselves, there is already a tremendous amount of Chef-related activity in the OpenStack ecosystem. Intel has joined with Opscode early on as a sponsor and technical advisor to these efforts and versions of the cookbooks will be published to Intel Cloud Builders.

We are also working with community partners such as Rackspace, Dell, DreamHost and HP to help provide a solid basis for deploying and managing OpenStack. We fully expect a wide variety of users to work with the cookbooks to support alternate configurations; making it easy to support changing hypervisors, databases, storage, and networking backends. OpenStack is a complex and evolving ecosystem, we want to help it grow.

Opscode is also releasing a major update to the knife-openstack plugin, enabling users to rapidly create, bootstrap and manage OpenStack compute instances. Now supporting the new ‘Essex’ release of OpenStack, knife-openstack now uses the OpenStack API directly and has quite a few new features. Using Chef, OpenStack users can automate everything from server provisioning to application deployment in OpenStack-based cloud architectures directly from the command line, ensuring infrastructure is consistent and easily scalable.

The project and code are under active development and in the process of being documented and published to the following locations: